Pattern Recognition

11. BOONE CHU

Boone Chu kicks back cowboy-style, legs crossed, on Damien's new brown couch. “You've worked for Blue Ant before?” He looks somewhat gimlet-eyed now, though maybe she's misreading some Chinese-American nerd thing, an unabashed intensity of focus.

“A few jobs in New York.” From her perch on the workstation chair. “Freelance?”

“That's right.”

“Me too.”

“What do you do?”

“Systems.” He waits a beat. “University of Texas, Harvard, then I had a start-up. Which tanked.”

He doesn't sound bitter, though people who say this seldom do, she's noticed, which she finds a little creepy. They generally know better. She hopes he isn't one of those. “I Google you, I get…?”

“Sound of relatively high-profile start-up, tanking loudly. Certain amount of 'white-hat hacker' coverage, before that, but that's media.” He looks over at the robot girls propped against the wall, but doesn't ask.

“What was your start-up about?”

“Security.”

“Where do you live?”

“Washington state. I've got a cliff on Orcas with a 'fifty-one Airstream propped up against it on railroad ties. It's held together with mold, and something that eats aluminum. I was going to build a house, but now I can't bring myself to spoil the view.”

“You're based there?”

“I'm based in this.” He toes the child-sized antique suitcase. “Where do you live, Cayce?”

“West One Hundred and Eleventh.”

“Actually I knew you lived in New York.”

“You did?”

“I Googled you.”

She hears the kettle start to boil. She's left the whistle off. She gets up. He gets up too and follows her into the kitchen. “Nice yellow,” he says.

“Damien Pease.”

“Pardon?”

“Pease. Porridge hot. The video director. Know his work?”

“Not offhand.”

“It's his flat. What did Bigend offer you, exactly, Boone?”

“Partnership, he said.”

She watches him watching her expression as he speaks.

“With him,” he continues. “Whatever that means. He wants me to work with you. To find the person or persons uploading the video clips. We'd have as much as we needed for expenses, but I'm not sure what the payoff might consist of.” He has one of those tall, impossibly dense Chinese-guy brush cuts, and a long face that might seem feminine if it weren't tempered, she guesses, by having grown up in Tulsa having to deal with being a Chinese-American named Boone.

“Did he tell you why he wants us to work together? Or why he'd want me at all?” She tosses tea-sub into the pot and pours water over the bags. “Sorry. Forgot to ask if you wanted coffee.”

“Tea's fine.” He goes to the sink and starts rinsing out two mugs she's left there. Something about his movements reminding her of a chef she'd once dated. The way he briskly refolds the tea towel before using it to dry the mugs. “He said that you don't need to reinvent any wheels.”

He puts the mugs down, side by side. “He said that if anyone could figure out where this stuff comes from, it would be you.”

“And you?”

“I'm supposed to facilitate. You have an idea, I make it happen.” She looks at him. “You can do that?”

“I'm not magic, but I'm handy. Hands-on generalist, you might say.” She pours. “Do you want to do it?”

He picks up his tea-sub. Sniffs. “What is it?”

“I don't know. It's Damien's. No caffeine, though.”

He blows to cool it, then sips. Winces. “Hot.”

“Well, do you? Want to do it?”

Looks at her, steam rising from the cup he still holds close to his mouth. “I'm of two minds.” He lowers the cup. “It's an interesting problem, from a theoretical point of view, and as far as we know no one's solved it yet. I'm available, and Bigend has a lot of money to throw at it.”

“That's your upside?”

He nods, sips more tea-sub. Winces again. “Downside is Bigend. Hard to quantify that, isn't it?” He goes to the kitchen window and seems to he looking out, but then he points to the round transparent ventilator fan set into a six-inch hole in one pane of glass. “We don't have those things. They're everywhere, here. Always have been. I'm not even sure what they're supposed to do.”

“They're part of the mirror-world,” Cayce says.

“Mirror-world?”

“The difference.”

“My idea of a mirror-world is Bangkok. Asia somewhere. This is just more of our stuff.”

“No,” she tells him, “different stuff. That's why you noticed that vent. They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up.”

“I see what you mean, but I don't think it's going to be that way much longer. Not if the world's Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there's no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway.” His eyes meet hers.

They each carry a cup of tea-sub back and take their seats again.

“How about you,” he asks, “how do you feel about Bigend?”

And why, she wonders, is she even having this conversation? How much to do with their glancing encounter in the street this morning, which he shows no sign of remembering? Her sense of urban disconnect, then: seeing him as a passing stranger she'd never see again, and now having him turn up this way.

“Hubertus Bigend is a very smart man,” she says, “and I don't like him very much.”

“Why not?”

“I seem to have an attitude about how he operates as a human being. I don't feel strongly enough about it to refuse to work for his company, but the idea of working with him on a more personal basis makes me uncomfortable.” Immediately thinking: Why have I told him this, I don't know him at all, what if he goes back to Bigend and tells him what I just said?

He sits there, his long fingers around his mug of tea-sub, looking at her over it. “He can afford to buy people,” he says. “I don't want to wind up as a gadget on his key ring. I'm not exactly immune to the kind of money Bigend has to play with. When that start-up was on the fence, teetering back and forth, I found myself doing things I came to regret.”

She looks at him. Is this the truth, or self-advertisement?

He frowns. “Why do you think he wants it?”

“He thinks he can productize it.”

“Then monetize it.” He puts the cup down on the carpet.

“He says it's about excellence, not money.”

“Sure,” Boone Chu says, “the money's just a sort of side effect. And that lets him keep it vague with us.”

“But if he priced it, it would be less interesting, wouldn't it? If he put a fixed ticket on it for us, it would just be another job. He's appealing to something deeper.”

“And treating it as though it's a done deal.”

“I've noticed that.” She watches his eyes. “But would you want to give him the satisfaction?”

“If I don't, I may never have the satisfaction of getting to the bottom of this,” he says. “And I've tried already”

“You have?”

“Sometimes I can do it sitting around in a hotel room, playing with this.” He nudges the suitcase with his foot. “I couldn't get anywhere, but that only has a way of getting me going.”

“What do you have in there?”

He picks up the suitcase and clicks its latches. It's lined with cubes of gray foam, arranged to form a recess for a featureless rectangle of gray metal. He lifts this, a titanium laptop, out, and she sees more recesses, assorted coiled cables, three cell phones, and one of those big, specialist, multi-bit screwdrivers. One of the phones is cased in candy-apple mango.

“What's that?” she asks, pointing to the mango phone.

“Japan.”

“And you can use a screwdriver too?”

“Never go anywhere without one.”

And this, somehow, she believes completely.

THEY wind up eating noodles together in that pan-Asian place on Parkway, sanded wood and raku bowls, and now he's deep into the resolution thing. Old hat to the F:F:F veteran but he has a refreshingly clear take on it. “Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection. The visual information, the grain of that imagery, is all there. Footage of a lower resolution couldn't be enlarged and retain its clarity. If it's computer-generated, somebody had to put that there.” He raises his chopsticks toward his mouth. “Rendering farms. Ever see one?” He pops the noodles into his mouth and chews.

“No.”

He swallows, puts his chopsticks down. “Big room, lots of stations, renderers working through your footage a frame at a time. Labor intensive. Shakespeare's monkeys, but working to a plan. Rendering is expensive, human-intensive, involves a lot of people, and would probably be impossible to keep a secret, for very long, in a situation like this. Someone would tell, unless there were unusual constraints in place. These people sit there and massage your imagery a pixel at a time. Sharpen it up. Add detail. Do hair. Hair is a nightmare. And they don't get paid much.”

“So the Garage Kubrick hypothesis is just a dream?”

“Unless the maker has access to levels of technology that don't, as far as we know, exist yet. Assuming the footage is entirely computer-generated means that your maker either has de-engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation. If you rule out the alien tech, where can you find that?”

“Hollywood.”

“Yes, but possibly in the more globally distributed sense. You're doing CGI in Hollywood, your rendering might be being done in New Zealand, say. Or Northern Ireland. Or, maybe, in Hollywood. Point is, that's still the industry. People talk. Given the interest this stuff has been generating, you'd need a culture of pathological secrecy to keep it from getting out.”

“You're not in 'Garage Kubrick,' then,” she says, “you're in 'Spielberg's Closet': the supposition that the footage is being produced by someone who already has godlike production resources. Someone who, for some reason, is opting to produce and release very unconventional material in a very unconventional way. Someone with the clout to keep it quiet.”

“You buy it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“How much time have you spent with the actual footage?”

“Not much.”

“How do you feel when you watch it?” He looks down at his noodles, then up at her. “Lonely?”

“Most people find that that deepens. Becomes sort of polyphonic. Then there's a sense that it's going somewhere, that something will happen. Will change.” She shrugs. “It's impossible to describe, but if you live with it for a while, it starts to get to you. It's just such a powerful effect, induced by so little actual screen time. I've never felt convinced that there's a recognized filmmaker around who can do that, although if you read the footage boards you'll see different directors constantly nominated.”

“Or maybe it's the repetition. Maybe you've been looking at this stuff for so long that you've read all this into it. And talking with other people who've been doing the same thing.”

“I've tried to convince myself of that. I've wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there's that sense of… I don't know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?”

“Eat your noodles. Then we can talk.”

AND they do, walking. Up to Camden Lock along the High Street, the weekend's Crusaders all gone home, passing the window of the designers of Damien's kitchen cabinets, Boone touching on his childhood in Oklahoma, the highs and lows of his start-up experience, vicissitudes of industry and the broader economy since the previous September. He seems to be making an effort to tell her who he is. Cayce in turn telling him a little about her work and nothing at all about its basis in her peculiar sensitivities.

Until they find themselves on the canal's shabby towpath, under a sky like a gray-scale Cibachrome of a Turner print, too powerfully backlit. This spot reminding her now of a visit to Disneyland with Win and her mother, when she was twelve. Pirates of the Caribbean had broken down and they'd been rescued by staff wearing hip-waders over their pirate costumes, to be led through a doorway into a worn, concrete-walled, oil-stained subterranean realm of machinery and cables, inhabited by glum mechanics, these backstage workers reminding Cayce of the Morlocks in The Time Machine.

It had been a difficult trip for her because she couldn't tell her parents that she'd started trying to avoid having Mickey in her field of vision, and by the fourth and final day she'd developed a rash. Mickey hadn't subsequently become a problem, but she still avoided him anyway, out of a sense of having had a close shave.

Now Boone apologizes for having to check his e-mail; says he may have incoming he'd like her to see. Sits on a bench and gets out his laptop. She goes to the canal's edge and looks down. A gray condom, drifting like a jellyfish, a lager can half-afloat, and deeper down swirls something she can't identify, swathed in a pale and billowing caul of ragged builder's plastic. She shudders and turns away.

“Have a look at this,” he says, looking up from his screen, the open laptop across his knees. She crosses the towpath and sits beside him. He passes her the laptop. Washed out in the afternoon light, she sees an opened message:

“Who's it from?”

“Friend of mine at Rice. I had him look at all hundred and thirty-five segments.”

“What's he do?”

“Math. I've never even remotely understood it. Interviews angels for positions on pinheads. We had him onboard for the start-up. Encryption issues, but that's only a by-product of whatever it is he does theoretically. Seems to find it intensely comical that there's any practical application whatever.”

And she hears herself say: “It's a watermark.”

Then he's looking at her. She can't read the look at all. “How do you know?”

“There's someone in Tokyo who claims to have a number that someone else extracted from segment seventy-eight.”

“Who extracted it?”

“Footageheads. Otaku types.”

“Do you have the number?”

“No. I'm not even positive that it's true. He might be making it up.”

“Why?”

“To impress a girl. But she doesn't exist either.”

He stares at her. “What would it take to find out if it's true?”

“An airport,” she says, having to admit to herself now that she's already worked it out, already gone there, “a ticket. And a lie.”

He takes the laptop back, shuts it down, closes it, leaving his hands resting on the featureless gray metal. Looking down at it, he might be praying. Then he looks up at her. “Your call. If it's real, and you can get it, it might take us somewhere.”

“I know,” she says, and that's really all she can say, so she just sits there, wondering what she might have set in motion, where it might go, and why.